Pagan Morals
I
As M. Bergson remarks, it is very fatiguing to be a human being. If we compare ourselves with the other animals we see how hard our case is. We have in the first place to stand upright, a feat for which we are not yet completely adapted. And then we are obliged to do more or less thinking, however skillfully we may reduce the amount. Above all we are compelled by a number of constraining influences to be to a certain degree consciously ‘good.’ Whenever we begin to think about the perplexing question of goodness, to wonder why we are almost all driven more or less spasmodically to strive for it and to complain because it is so elusive, so hard to attain even with the best will in the world, so uncertain in its aims and claims and sanctions, so troublesome and yet so indispensable, we are driven back to the Greeks.
The man in the street is not likely to name as the foremost attribute of the Greeks their moral success, and yet he ought to. They, first of men, made a discovery about morals which must be our salvation if we are to be saved, and their interest in the subject is obscured for us only by the multiplicity of their claims on our attention. If, like the Hebrews, they had stripped life of all its agréments, if they had had no sense of beauty or of humor, no splendid achievements of pure literature, of politics, or of science, we should see them, as we see the Hebrews, consumed by their concern for righteousness.
Among people like the Englishspeaking communities who instinctively avoid whenever possible the pain and strain of thought, a happy literary formula comes easily to have the paralyzing effect of a taboo. The freest minds are the source of the most compelling formulas, and they therefore quite unintentionally rivet new bonds upon their contemporaries in the place of those they strike off. Thus Matthew Arnold, a man given to thinking for himself, provided his age with a number of catchwords which dispensed those who used them from giving any further thought to the subjects to which they apply. I suppose no one reads Matthew Arnold to-day, but his most striking formulas have passed into the tradition of English speech and go marching indefinitely on. One of the most telling and most misleading is his famous chapter-heading, ‘Hebraism and Hellenism.’ There are in the chapter itself paragraphs which if carefully read go far to minimize the antithesis suggested by the title. But a man who is writing under so taking a caption can hardly help being carried on by auto-suggestion to the symmetrical rounding out of its implications. Thus Arnold begins by stating plumply that ‘the final aim of both Hellenism and Hebraism, as of all great spiritual disciplines, is no doubt the same: man’s perfection or salvation. The very language which they both of them use in schooling us to reach this aim is often identical. Even where their language indicates by variation—sometimes a broad variation, often a but slight and subtle variation — the different courses of thought which are uppermost in each discipline, even then the unity of the final end and aim is still apparent.’ And he goes on to explain that the difference is mainly one of temperament and of method.
So far he is sound and consistent, though we may be permitted to doubt whether he puts his finger on the precise difference of method that constitutes the antithesis. But toward the end of his brilliant chapter he insensibly swings back to the vulgar error he elsewhere strives to combat. He has forgotten that the Greek equally with the Hebrew was concerned ‘for man’s perfection or salvation.’ And he commits the historic blunder of confounding the Hellenism of Hellas with the so-called Hellenism of the Revival of Learning. ‘The Renascence,’ he writes, ‘that great reawakening of Hellenism, that irresistible return of humanity to nature and to seeing things as they are, which in art, in literature, and in physics, produced such splendid fruits, had, like the anterior Hellenism of the Pagan world, a side of moral weakness, and of relaxation or insensibility of the moral fibre, which in Italy showed itself with the most startling plainness, but which in France, England, and other countries was very apparent too.'
His title has been too much for him. If Hebraism consists largely in moral earnestness, Hellenism must have ’a side of moral weakness.’ But even if the chapter were the most complete correction of the implication of its heading, perhaps only one person has read the chapter for every thousand who have been subjected to the injurious effect of the title. The total result has been to stereotype the conception of Hellenism formed by the Lutheran movement and affirmed by the anticlassical reaction which followed the French Revolution. According to this conception the Greek was a happy faun, obeying the voice of appet ite and burdened by no consciousness of sin. If we recall the individual Greeks who are best known to us from childhood, — Odysseus, Achilles, Œdipus, Solon, Leonidas, Pericles, Socrates, Archimedes, — it is an astonishing tribute to the strength of formula that the resultant composite photograph can be made to resemble a happy faun.
II
There is nevertheless a very real distinction between Hebraism and Hellenism in the field of morals. It cannot be expressed by saying that the one made ‘better’ men than the other. It would be easy enough to show that Hebraism as well as Hellenism had ‘a side of moral weakness.’ One superiority of the Greek from our point of view was his rather extraordinary love of truth. Homer is full of the sacredness of the oath, of which Zeus was guardian. I know a little boy who had become familiar with the words and deeds of the Homeric heroes and knew that one of the most perverse of them had declared with sincerity, ‘Hateful to me as hell is he who hides one thing in his heart and tells another.’ This boy was next introduced to the stories of the Hebrews and listened with wondering eyes to the extraordinary tale of greed and falsehood which centres about the name of Jacob. He was waiting for the curse of heaven to fall upon the traitor, but when the narrative went on to tell how Jehovah approved the deed and said to Jacob, ‘Thou shalt spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed,’ the little boy cried out in his bewilderment, ‘But was n’t that naughty of Jehovah?’
A striking case of the superior conscientiousness of the Greeks in regard to truth comes out in a story told by Herodotus. Hipparchus, tyrant of Athens in the sixth century, a man whom the Greeks themselves would not have pointed out as a type of virtue, banished his friend Onomacritus, editor of the prophecies of Musæus, because Onomacritus foisted into the writings of Musæus a prophecy of his own. With this strict critical sense of the sanctity of documents, which perished with Hellenism and has come to life only in the scholarly conscience of our own day, we may compare the attitude of the Hebrew priest of the fifth century before Christ, who, from the highest motives, systematically revised, expurgated, and augmented the sacred writings and imposed the new edition on the people as of immemorial antiquity.
Such comparisons between pot and kettle are not however really fruitful. The truly instructive contrast between Hebraism and Hellenism is based on the fact that they typify most conveniently the two sorts of sanction which have in varying combinations operated everywhere in the world to make men consciously practice what they believe to be right.
Many causes of course operate to make men unconsciously choose the right, working for the survival of the individual and of the group. But when a man gives a reason for his moral choices it falls under one of two heads. He has either a theory, utilitarian, hedonistic, or transcendental, in accordance with which he acts; or he acts in obedience to some law which he acknowledges to be authoritative even in extreme cases where it conflicts with his reason. Under one of these heads or the other, the rational or the jural, can be ranged every reason which any one has ever given for making a moral choice. Perhaps most men use both types in varying proportions; certainly every social group is governed by both. Most religions rely mainly on the jural principle, but many strive to conciliate law with reason. And rational systems on the other hand often tend to crystallize into laws which exact and receive obedience after changing circumstances have destroyed their rational basis. The taboo everywhere is jural. We may be able to see in certain cases a sanitary or economic ground for a taboo, but it is not that ground that makes it binding. It is no more binding than other tabooes which lack that ground, and the great majority of which we have knowledge do lack it. The taboo, however, is not yet morality, though it is on the way to become so. It is gradually softened into custom; custom becomes after a time self-conscious and critical; and thus morality is born.
Now it is evident that the chief problem of morality everywhere and at all times lies in the fact that the old order is always changing. In regard to moral ideas as to all other ideas, the human procession straggles along like an early people on the trek; a few leaders press forward in advance, the mass do as they are told and cling to each other for mutual comfort and assurance, bands of heretics here and there fall off to find a better way or to settle in an attractive spot, declaring they will seek no further; and at the end of the column are the incompetent and the lazy, begging to be left behind to die.
In this irregular advance through an uncharted land toward an unknown goal, the leaders have always upon their shoulders the burden of their responsibility toward the weaker brethren. The choice of the moment for breaking up the last camp and pressing on again into the wilderness becomes in itself the nicest of moral questions. Ethics are ‘alike fantastic if too new or old.’ All manner of anomalies and contradictions are born of the fact that where men long to find a set of laws as rigorous and of as universal application as those of mathematics, they find merely a group of principles themselves open to dispute and needing at every turn the labor of comprehension and of application. In this situation many a good man has violated his conscience to obey the law, and many a good man by obeying his conscience in spite of the law has so weakened a rule that was helpful to others as to have become a stumbling-block. Thus there are apparently cases in which it is wrong to do right. ‘You seem to think honesty as easy as blind-man’s-buff,’ says one of Stevenson’s characters. ‘ I don’t. It’s some difference of definition.’
III
As part of the great effort not to think, the jural conception of morals, the notion that morals are, like geometry or blind-man’s-buff, amenable to ascertainable and universally binding laws, has been of unquestionable usefulness to the race, but it has enjoyed a popularity out of all proportion to its usefulness. Some of its drawbacks may most conveniently be noted in connection with Hebraism, which is its fullest and most enduring expression. Mr. Dewey and Mr. Tufts remark that the Decalogue is the mother of casuistry, and that the habit of looking to law for guidance ‘fixes attention not upon the positive good in an act, nor upon the underlying agent’s disposition which forms its spirit, nor upon the unique occasion and context which form its atmosphere, but upon its literal conformity with Rule A, Class I, Species 1, sub-head (1), and so forth. The effect of this is inevitably to narrow the scope and lessen the depth of conduct. It tempts some to hunt for that classification of their act which will make it the most convenient or profitable for themselves. With others, this regard for the letter makes conduct formal and pedantic. It gives rise to a rigid and hard type of character illustrated among the Pharisees of olden and the Puritans of modern time.’
The drawbacks here dwelt upon are all in the nature of injuries to the moral sense of the individual. It might conceivably be the case that the general social welfare would be so furthered by the punctilious observance of an immutable moral code that the sacrifice of the highest spiritual life of the individual would be worth the price. In point of fact, however, society suffers from it as much as the individual. The prevalence of such a code tends to render society static. Certain groups have never emerged from the primitive jural stage of taboo, and are tied hand and foot by it. Two things happen when conduct, in itself a conservative thing, is in close alliance with religion, which is even more conservative and therefore opposes very great resistance to modification. In the first place the preoccupation with law becomes so great that there is no room left in life for other considerations. And in the second place, as the unchangeable code becomes obsolete, the people bound by it falls out of sympathy with more progressive peoples and is left behind as they advance.
The Hebrews suffered in both these ways. In the first place the struggle for life and the observance of the law exhausted their energies and left them no time for art, for science, or for general literature. The meagreness of their intellectual life as long as they remained a nation was not only a misfortune to themselves but has remained a misfortune for Europe, since the revivals of Hebraism which take place from time to time always include in their principles a presumption against art, science, and general literature. It will be seen, however, when we glance at Hellenism, that though these fields of life are refractory, or at best irrelevant, to the law, they afford, like every other field, the constant, occasion for moral choice based on reason, and were not conceived by the Greeks, as by some moderns, as unmoral, but as having ethical bearings of the very highest importance. In the second place the Hebrews were very greatly hampered in social advance by the static character of their institutions. Of course their institutions were not actually rigid, or the group would not have had the measure of national success it did enjoy. Even Jehovah was obliged in the long run to alter his political opinions and approve of monarchy after having long opposed it. But the social and economic reforms so passionately urged by Amos and Isaiah never came to pass.
The jural system of morals of the Hebrews rapidly reasserted itself in Christian theory, although the founder of Christianity died in protest against the law. The Church of Rome affirmed the principle with all its consequences from the hieratic point of view, and the Reformation affirmed it from the documentary point of view. Modern thought is saturated with it. Kant’s categorical imperative is descended from the Decalogue much more directly than he would have liked to believe. On the other hand it has become plainer than ever during the last hundred years that morality is a growing thing, changing with changing conditions, varying from land to land and from age to age; that its formulas are to be accepted as provisional, not permanent, and that its natural sanctions are powerful enough to make it persist. ‘La vertu, sans doute, est de tous les pays et de tous les ages. Sa presénce est partout nécessaire, le peuple ne subsiste que par elle.’ This belief in the social origin, the progressive character, and the natural sanction of ethics is the belief of the Greeks. They were the first of mankind to hold it, and the weight of their prestige sufficed to keep it alive in the world through the centuries when the jural view prevailed. It is still far from triumphant. The force of authority is still overwhelming. We are just beginning to struggle back to the state of mind which was native to the Greeks, and, thanks to them, was enjoyed even by the Romans, a people astonishingly like ourselves in their spiritual limitations.
IV
The Greek of course began like all other men by practicing the primitive morality of custom, and the primitive morality of custom is that of the ant and the bee, a morality careful of the welfare of the group, careless of the single life. We are accustomed in our own day to see it practiced only under military forms, and even there it has been considerably modified by civil standards, so that the world is astounded when it sees, as in the case of the Japanese, the old psychology of the group in full action with its light esteem of the single life.
But in early society it is not only in warfare but throughout life that the individual is subordinated to the group. His every act if it is to be pronounced good must be performed in the customary way, and his very opinions are the common possession of his people. We who are feeling in various ways the ill effects of a long period of laissez-faire individualism are naturally returning or trying to return to the more social view of ethics, and to the conception of solidarity as the chief ethical motive. But the old groups are gone and, living in a welter of cross-classification, it is hard for a man to decide whether his allegiance is due to his race, his nation, his trade-union, his church, or his social stratum.
The Greek, on the other hand, when history begins, was discovering individualism and criticizing custom, not merely this or that custom, but custom in general and as a principle; and the criticism of custom is the beginning of rational ethics. We cannot tell how early the process began. When Archelaus, the last of the Ionic philosophers and the master of Socrates, remarks ‘that the just and the base exist not by nature but by convention,’ the terms have already a technical ring. At about the same time Democritus, who understood his universe so well, pointed out that ‘ the institutions of society are human creations, while the void and atoms exist by nature,’ a distinction as inconceivable to the savage as to the bee. When remarks like this can be made by different thinkers in different connections, the conception they involve must be well established and generally understood. In Aristotle’s time it was hoary with antiquity; it was, says he, ‘a universal mode of arguing with the ancients, — namely the opposition of nature and convention.’
The discovery, then, that social and political institutions are made by man and are therefore subject to alteration and adaptation, is one of the great achievements of Hellenism. It is the first law of Greek ethics; and the second is of almost equal importance, for it teaches that in discussing questions of right and wrong, the term ‘ man ’ must always be held to mean ‘ man-insociety.’ The raison d’être of the state is to cause its citizens to live nobly, and right conduct is the subject-matter of political science. These two principles were never abandoned by Greek ethics in general. Of course the advance of individualism brought into greater prominence the subjective aspect of ethics, the necessity that the heart should be ‘ right,’ the necessity of faith as well as of works. And certain schools in later days advocated a measure of withdrawal from the world. But self-perfection in isolation was never a Greek ideal, for isolation was in itself immoral by definition.
The notion that the conventional usages and sanctions of conduct were not based on nature led, of course, not only to the searching investigations of serious men but to the paradoxes of the Nietzsches of the fifth century before Christ. ‘So entirely astray are you,’ says Thrasymachus to Socrates, ‘in your ideas about the just and unjust as not even to know that justice and the just are in reality another’s good; that is to say, the interest of the ruler and stronger, and the loss of the subject and servant; and injustice the opposite; for the unjust is lord over the truly simple and just: he is the stronger, and his subjects do what is for his interest, and minister to his happiness, which is very far from being their own.’
When the question was thus roundly and uncompromisingly stated, the Greeks set themselves to answer it. So far from showing a deficiency of interest in moral conduct, they may be said without exaggeration to have had no important interests that did not consciously involve the ethical motive. It is held up as a defect in their system of classifying sciences that they had so much difficulty in disentangling morals from politics that even Aristotle declares that ‘politics deals with right conduct.’ But this difficulty arose from one of their soundest notions, — the loss of which from the world has been a calamity, — the notion, namely, that a state is to be judged not by the number of its inhabitants, for it may easily have too many inhabitants, nor by its aggregate wealth, for that may be illdistributed, nor by its success in maintaining order, for a tyrant can maintain order even more readily than can a self-governing body, but by the high type of life lived by its citizens. In other words, if ethics was not detached from politics, it was because politics was saturated with ethics. It is a commonplace that the great historians of Greece, Herodotus and Thucydides, different as they were in temperament and in method, agreed in this, that they were profoundly struck by the moral aspect of political acts. The speeches in Thucydides are full of the theory of international ethics. There is plenty of Macchiavellianism in them, which produces its full psychological effect. When the Athenians in Sicily were trying to secure active support from Camarina, their envoy laid down the maxim that ‘to a tyrant or to an imperial city nothing is inconsistent that is expedient.’ With the crime of Melos behind them and the flight from Syracuse before, these words have all the grisly, ironic import that formed one of the sources of interest in Greek tragedy.
If politics and ethics, which seem to us to be separate things, were never fully dissociated by the Greeks, because the body-politic had a primarily ethical purpose, it followed that all the other sciences and arts, which were in the service of the state to a degree we can hardly imagine, were also followed with a consciously ethical aim.
To us, who instinctively associate ethics with dogma, it appears that the only safe course for science and art is to keep clear altogether of the ethical question. We remember how strong a resistance the great organized custodians of ethics have presented to the conclusions of natural science, and how disagreeably the nonconformist conscience is affected by (for instance) the nude in art. It is not unusual for the friends of science and art, when discouraged by these manifestations, to refer with envious yearning to the freedom from ethical bias that surrounded the work of Greek artists and men of science. The truth is of course that it was the absence of dogma only that made Greek art and science free; as for ethics, it was the postulate of their activity. But Greek ethics did not require of a man of science that his results should square with preconceived ideas; it required on the contrary that he should prosecute his task with patience, integrity and courage. The best Greek thought would not have shuddered at the labors of Darwin because one of their by-products might be the weakening of a set of conventional motives for action; it would on the contrary have recognized and applauded the high qualities of self-devotion, persistence, and truthfulness which went to form his method, noting, however, one failing which it would have declared immoral, — the exaggerated use of a single set of faculties which in the long run deadened his responsiveness to the stimuli of literature and art.
The ethical motive was as strong in Greek art as in Greek science. Springing from the religious motive, Greek art always retained the consciousness of a ‘purpose,’ but this purpose was the simple interpretation of beauty which the Greeks held to be a divine thing and of overwhelming ethical importance. ‘ Conscientiousness ’ in the artist’s sense was the law of Greek production. The Parthenon is a triumph of character as well as of genius, and from the Parthenon to the shards of water-bottles the remnants of Greek craftsmanship show us hardly a trace of hasty or scamped work.
But over and beyond his standard as a workman there stood in the mind of the Greek artist his responsibility to the state. He was working, not as the modern artist does, for a little group of connoisseurs, but for a whole people sensitive beyond what we can understand to the stimuli of art. The execution of an important statue was to a Greek city what the installation of a proper water supply is to a modern city, in the fact that it affected everybody. A people thus permeated with ethical ideas would naturally take a keen interest in replying to the fundamental questions asked by the paradoxologists of the fifth century. Socrates in particular devoted his life to answering these questions, and all the answers ever offered from that day to this (except those of jural systems based on supernatural authority) are descended in one way or another from views of his. To the proposition that ‘virtue is a convention’ he opposed the proposition that ‘ virtue is a science,’ with the corollaries that virtue can be taught and that all sin is ignorance. This theory in various forms underlay all subsequent views of conduct.
Virtue never seemed to the Greeks to be as easy as blind-man’s-buff. A man’s successful conduct of life was in their view as purely a function of his intellectual faculty as was his success at a game of chess. He who can foresee the greatest number of moves is the best player. If a man could attain omniscience and so behold the relations and effects of an action as they ramify to infinity, he would never act amiss. The wise man is accordingly the good man, and the charming goodness of babes and sucklings is a happy accident, but it is not virtue. An immense responsibility was therefore thrown upon education, whose primary aim was to be the moulding of character. And the method of education was to be the formation of reasoned moral habits as a substitute for the unreasoned unmoral habits of primitive man.
The Greeks thus in a very short space of time after they first began to consider the matter systematically, applied to conduct, which in their judgment was not ‘three fourths’ but four fourths of life, a psychology which the most modern science can but corroborate. ‘Consciousness,’ says Professor Angell, ‘occupies a curious middle ground between hereditary reflex and automatic activities upon the one hand and acquired habitual activities upon the other.’ In ethics as in every other field, the Greeks saw first of men that the work of consciousness is never done. No final set of moral habits can ever be established. Changing conditions make any given set inappropriate, and wisdom must be ever occupied with the work of modification. It is in the light of this conception of right conduct as a science and the widest of sciences, capable of being perfectly grasped by omniscience alone, that the doctrine of expediency laid down by the Athenian envoy in Thucydides would make the Greek shudder as he always did before the spectacle of ὕβρis that is of conduct based on unsufficient data. The famous ‘irony’ of Greek tragedy consists in the fact that a character in the play is acting with ignorance or with unwisdom. Every one in the audience knows something, a fact or a principle, which is strongly relevant to his case but of which he is himself unaware. The little ironies of life and the great ironies of history have no other source.